Critics and Crusaders

Political Economy and the American Quest for Freedom

Charles A. Madison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351524858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The quest for freedom has always been a defining characteristic of the American people. That neither constitutionalism nor capitalism has secured complete freedom for every person is demonstrated by media announcements of slavery, oppression, exploitation, and a variety of shortcomings in the economic system. That said, and as this volume seeks to demonstrate through a history of radical commentaries, there have always been bold spirits who fight for such ambitious heights.With changing times, freedom meant different things to those who worked for it. This book in its broadest sense is a history of libertarianism. Each of the libertarians in this full study, extending from William Lloyd Garrison to Eugene V. Debs, fought for the ideal of political economy as a practical ideal. In so doing these major figures at the margins of power expanded the entire field of human rights. Charles A. Madison concludes that radicalism became an ideology in the search for freedom.The zeal and activity of these figures did much to attain the political freedom and economic well- being that Americans are inclined to take for granted. These individual chapters are set in frames supplied by background sketches of the movements each group led, and the whole is an attempt to depict and re-evaluate America's social progress without the rigor or formality of impersonalized history.

THE MILITANT LIBERALS

THE LIBERAL BACKGROUND

FOR A GENERATION and more the crusade against Negro slavery had dominated the activities of American liberals. The various progressive movements of the 1830’s and 1840’s had been almost completely eclipsed by the concentrated Abolitionist effort of the succeeding decade. Once the Civil War had ended, however, it appeared as if all zeal for reform had died with the slavery issue. With the Negroes nominally free, even the extreme Abolitionists—Wendell Phillips excepted—acted as if the millennium had arrived.

Yet the voice of liberal protest was sorely needed in the years following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. For the end of chattel slavery coincided with the intensification of economic inequality. The Civil War had not only stimulated Northern businessmen to develop machine industry at an accelerated pace but had also enabled bankers to concentrate and control the liquid capital of the nation. When peace came, these two groups had the means and the techniques for the exploitation of the continent that lay open before them. Nor did they hesitate to make the most of their boundless opportunities. With an arrogance and callousness that matched their energy and enterprise, they established new industries, covered the country with a spider web of iron rails, and exploited the nation’s vast natural resources—all to their great personal advantage. In their compulsive efforts to get rich quick they ruined competitors by ruthless and dishonest means and deceived their unsuspecting and helpless customers. To obtain franchises and special privileges they bribed legislators and corrupted high officials without the least scruple. They did not hesitate to make the government serve their private advantage because they believed that the state’s prime function was to expedite business enterprise. “It was an anarchistic world,” wrote Professor Parring-ton, “of strong, capable men, selfish, unenlightened, amoral—an excellent example of what human nature will do with undisciplined freedom. In the Gilded Age freedom was the freedom of buccaneers preying on the argosies of Spain.”

The farmers were among the early victims of rapacious businessmen. Unlike those who had lived off the land before 1860—pioneers who had turned to the frontier in their quest for economic independence—the Civil War veterans and European immigrants who were lured to the virgin prairies by the prospect of a free homestead were neither independent nor self-sufficient. Mostly without means, forced to outfit their farms with capital borrowed at a usurious rate of interest, wholly dependent on the railroads for the shipment of their crops and on a falling price level for their gross income, the large majority of these hard-working farmers failed pathetically in their efforts to free themselves of debt. For years the objects of exploitation on the part of the railroads and the grain elevators, the meat packers, the local bankers and storekeepers, they became in effect the drudges of an industrialized society. The phrase “ten-cent corn and ten-percent interest” truly expressed their plight.

It was this harsh adversity that drove the farmers into politics. In the early 1870’s they turned their Granges, which they had founded several years earlier as a nonpolitical and secret social organization, into forums, in which much was said against unscrupulous railroads and extortionate bankers. Although natural individualists, they were forced by necessity to turn to the government for redress. Their gatherings were not part of an organized revolt but the spontaneous and sporadic expression of despair. The Granges quickly multiplied in number and soon counted a million and a half members. Their leaders called on the legislatures of their respective states for laws curbing monopolies. In 1873 the Illinois Grange demanded that the despotic railroad, which “defies our laws, plunders our shippers, impoverishes our people, and corrupts our government, shall be subdued and made to subserve the public interest at whatever cost.” The following year the National Grange expressed its strong condemnation of “the tyrannies of monopolies.” As a consequence of this widespread agitation, state after state in the Middle West enacted “Granger” laws regulating the railroads and other monopolies. In 1876 the Supreme Court upheld the authority of the state to regulate railroads and grain elevators. Economic conditions, however, did not favor the Grange. Most of its members, eager for immediate relief, dropped away when their cooperatives failed or when they could not obtain ready redress by political means. Nevertheless the Grange did not perish and continues to serve farmers to the present.

Meantime urban liberals, outraged by the corruption that characterized President Grant’s administration, began to consider means of purging national politics. They believed that improvements in the machinery of government plus upright officials would recapture the state from “the interests” and again provide equal opportunity for all. Led by Carl Schurz, Horace Greeley, Charles Francis Adams, Salmon Chase, and others of national prominence, they convened in 1872, organized the Liberal Republican party, chose Greeley as their Presidential candidate, and campaigned on a platform of honesty and efficiency in government. But the Grant political machine rode over them with the force of a steamroller. The young party of reformers failed miserably at the polls. Nevertheless the insurgents persevered in their attacks upon political corruption and business brigandage. It was largely through their efforts that such misfeasances as Credit Mobilier, the Salary Grab, the Whiskey Ring, and the Belknap Scandal were exposed to public condemnation.

The panic of 1873 and the subsequent economic depression spurred liberals and reformers to intensified activity. Wendell Phillips spoke out with powerful eloquence against the ill-treatment of wage laborers. To save workmen from enforced idleness and suffering, which he came to regard as worse than chattel slavery, he was ready to abolish the burgeoning system of capitalism. A few labor representatives agreed with him. Most liberals, however, were unwilling to consider so radical a proposal. Concrete immediate reforms appealed to them most. Because of their deep suspicion of bankers and brokers, they were most alarmed by the government’s deflationary policy. They criticized the resumption of specie payments and the continued withdrawal of Greenbacks from circulation as flagrantly bad measures certain further to squeeze the debt-ridden farmers and poor city workers. After considerable discussion they united to form the Greenback party in time to put a ticket in the 1876 campaign, with the patriarchal Peter Cooper at its head. In the election two years later the party reached its greatest strength, polling nearly a million votes. Powerless, however, to effect the social and monetary measures it advocated, it too began to decline with the passing of the economic depression at the end of the 1870’s.

The grievous poverty of the period called into question the fundamental pattern of our government. Men wanted to know why such privation and suffering should exist on a continent blest with untold wealth. Where, they asked, was our vaunted equal opportunity for all? When President Hayes ordered federal troops to break up the railroad strike without troubling to learn the wretched conditions which had driven hard-working men to desperate measures, Robert Ingersoll spoke for thousands when he condemned this use of soldiers against civilians.

I sympathize with every honest effort made by the children of labor to improve their condition. That is a poorly governed country in which those who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when men are obliged to beg for leave to toil. We are not yet a civilized people; when we are, pauperism and crime will vanish from our land.

Henry Demarest Lloyd, a Jeffersonian liberal, was the forerunner of the “muckraking” journalists of the 1900’s Unlike E.L. Godkin of The Nation, whose liberalism was narrowly Manchesterian and whose social criticism was directed more against the vulgarity than against the chicane and ruthlessness of the rich, Lloyd was profoundly perturbed by the rapacious ruffianism of our leading businessmen. Because the Standard Oil Company was the most notorious of the firms engaging in unscrupulous practices in the 1870’s, he selected it for special study. What he uncovered turned him into a social crusader. The company’s unrestrained lawlessness, its brutal extermination of honest competitors, its deceitful practices—the means which enabled it to reach a production of 6,000,000 barrels of oil annually and a capitalization of $200,000,000 in ten years’ time—appeared to him as the total negation of the principles upon which our nation had been founded. The factual article incorporating his findings, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1881, was, in the words of his biographer, “a turning point in our social history; with it dawned upon Americans the first conviction that this industrial development of which we had been so proud, was a source, not of strength, but of fatal weakness, and that the Republic could no more endure an oligarchy of capitalists than an oligarchy of slaveholders.” So great was the demand for this essay that seven printings of the issue containing it had to be ordered in quick succession. Judged by the testimony of Charles Edward Russell, the article struck fire in the minds of many Americans who cleaved to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

Lloyd persevered in his investigation of the criminal methods employed by large corporations to ruin competitors and to plunder the public. For years he pored over the reports of legislature investigations, trial records, and court decisions—gathering his data from sworn evidence and judicial findings in order to make his indictment the more devastating. In 1894 he published his monumental work on the subject, Wealth Against Commonwealth. Appearing during the nadir of a new and severe depression, when armies of hungry unemployed crowded the cities and tramped the countryside on the way to Washington, the book emphasized the callous cupidity that brought about this human suffering. After presenting a detailed and documented exposition of the manner in which the large corporations achieved monopolistic power, Lloyd declared that the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the Morgans were merely the beneficiaries of a state of mind which confused social self-interest with individual self-interest. Ever since Adam Smith we had assumed that these two interests were in effect identical—that the individual’s pursuit of personal gain would inevitably benefit society as a whole. In practice, however, capitalist enterprise has tended to encourage selfishness and to thwart the pursuit of the common good.

In industry we have been substituting all the mean passions that can set man against man in place of the irresistible power of brotherhood.... We have overworked the self-interest of the individual. The line of conflict between individual and social is a progressive one of the discovery of point after point in which the two are identical.

Grasping businessmen, however, have accepted the principle of “the public be damned.” They have regarded themselves as responsible to none but themselves.

Without restraint of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them.

Yet their arrogance cannot stay the tide of social progress. For all their concentration of power they cannot indefinitely escape the wrath of an outraged people. “Monopoly is business at the end of its journey. It has got there. The irrepressible conflict is now as distinctly with business as the issue so lately met was with slavery.” As a sanguine liberal Lloyd had no doubt of the outcome. But he knew that it could be achieved only when the mass of mankind understood the issue and insisted on the establishment of a self-interest that identified the individual with society. “The new selfinterest will remain unenforced in business until we invent the forms by which the vast multitudes who have been gathered together in modern production can organize themselves into a people there as in government.”

Wealth Against Commonwealth was read by thousands with the excited interest which a pirate adventure story arouses. It easily withstood the attacks of the lawyers and lackeys of the businesses it pilloried. Yet it attained only a mite of the effect one might have expected. The large middle class, upon whom changes in governmental policy largely depended, was horrified by Lloyd’s arraignment of big business but was loath to accept the alternative of social democracy. The book, however, became a quarry and a source of inspiration for the succeeding generation of liberals, and thus became a milestone on the road to social reform.

The poor and disgruntled farmers were indifferent to the advocates of civil service reform and were distrustful of, if not hostile to, Henry George’s single tax, but they readily followed the critics of monopolies and banks. When the Grange and the Greenback party failed them, they flocked to the Farmers Alliance. The aim of this organization was to improve the lot of its members and to right pressing social wrongs. Its leaders argued that while the railroads and banks and industries prospered, farmers were the victims of “some extrinsic baleful influence”; they, “the bone and sinew of the nation,” the producers of the largest bulk of necessities, were receiving a mere pittance in return. The restless and discontented, wrote Professor John D. Hicks, “voiced their sentiments more and fled from them less. Hence arose the veritable chorus of denunciation directed against those individuals and those corporations who considered only their own advantage without regard to the effect their actions might have upon the farmer and his interests.” This critical attitude among farmers served to stimulate interest in the Alliance groups, both in the South and in the West. Local branches soon united into statewide organizations and in 1882 they formed a national Farmers Alliance. Thereafter membership rose from 100,000 to 2,000,000 in 1890, when the Alliance reached its peak of activity and influence.

Throughout the 1880’s farmers, like the city-dwelling workers, were becoming increasingly class-conscious. It was a decade noted on the one hand for the rapid growth of big business and on the other for such evidences of discontent as Lloyd’s articles against monopolies, the publication and popularity of Progress and Poverty and Looking Backward, the strikes which culminated in the Haymarket hysteria, the Anti-Monopoly party in 1884, and the National Union Labor party in 1888. Each of these events furthered the farmers’ interest in politics. Poverty and continued debt made them more vociferous in their demands for help from government agencies. Frederick Jackson Turner stated that by 1890 “the defenses of the pioneer democrat began to shift from free land to legislation, from the ideal of individualism to the ideal of social control through regulation by law.” In the 1890 elections the Alliance sent two of its members to the Senate, eight to the House, and scores to state legislatures. Many other elected officials, particularly in the South, while nominally of the major parties, were openly in sympathy with Alliance demands.

The next logical step was greater political concentration. Alliance leaders in the West and South, roused by the widespread dissatisfaction among their followers, became sharply insistent in their demands for reform. Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas, famous for her advice to farmers to raise less corn and more hell, expressed the sentiments of many thousands when she declared: “We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.” “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, another popular agitator, was especially vehement in his attacks on the railroads because of their large land holdings. An admirer of Henry George, he argued that “man must have access to land or he is a slave. The man who owns the earth, owns the people, for they must buy the privilege of living on his earth.” Leaders of even greater eminence were James B.

Weaver, who had been the Greenback Presidential candidate in 1880 and who was generally trusted by those who sought reforms rather than a revolution; Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, an outstanding orator and versatile politician; William A. Peffer, Senator from Kansas; and Ben Tillman, L. L. Polk, and Thomas E. Watson—popular liberal spokesmen for the agricultural South.

In 1891 these and other representatives of Farmers Alliance groups met at a preliminary session in Cincinnati for the purpose of uniting their forces in the coming election. After many efforts at conciliation and combination, they agreed to hold an organizational meeting at an early date. This convention took place in St. Louis the following February. Delegates from twenty-two organizations, including a number of Congressmen from the major parties, sang and shouted their acclaim of the newly formed People’s party. The rostrum, according to a current periodical, “was filled with leaders of the Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the single tax people, the Prohibitionists, the Anti-Monopolists, the People’s party, the Reform Press, and the Women’s Alliance.” On the Fourth of July Populist delegates from nearly every state in the Union convened in Omaha to prepare a platform and nominate the national candidates. They were an evangelical, solemn, idealistic body of dissident reformers. “We believe,” they asserted in their platform, “that the time has come when railroad corporations will either own the people or the people must own the railroads.” In addition they demanded the government ownership of the telegraph and telephone lines, government loans to farmers at low rates of interest, the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, a graduated income tax, the reduction of the tariff, postal savings banks, shorter hours of labor, the popular election of Senators, and the adoption of the initiative and referendum. Although most of these planks have since been incorporated into our fundamental political pattern without in the least affecting our form of government, they seemed truly revolutionary to the conservatives of 1892 and were denounced as such by the leaders of both major parties. The Populist campaign was extremely vigorous. In the Western states numerous speakers, headed by the Presidential candidate Weaver, were received with enthusiastic approval. The aggravated Negro problem, however, kept most of the Southern farmers within the Democratic fold. When the votes were counted in November, Weaver’s share exceeded a million. Populist voters had also elected three Senators, ten Congressmen, four governors, and 345 state legislators.

The economic depression which ushered President Cleveland into his second term of office only intensified the wretched condition of the poor farmers and laborers. Nor were they mollified by the government’s apparent indifference to their plight. In the 1894 state elections this discontent was evidenced by a greatly increased vote for the Populist candidates—about a million and a half in all. Populist leaders were in a sanguine mood and began to plan for the national election two years hence. On the eve of the campaign their executive committee boldly declared that the main issue confronting the nation was the struggle between the people and big business.

There are but two sides in the conflict that is being waged in this country today. On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroad corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impoverish the people. On the other side are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all others who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation.... Between the two there is no middle ground.

The tide of events, however, made naught of the hopes of the radical Populists. Always eager for a plausible panacea, the mass of farmers and small merchants were readily persuaded by the silver advocates that their salvation lay in a reformed currency system. The immense popularity of W. H. Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School, which appeared in 1894 and contained a simplified exposition of the free-silver doctrine, proved a godsend to the bimetallist politicians. Shrewdly nurtured by them, the currency issue soon assumed first place in the minds of the majority of the people west and south of the Alleghenies. H. D. Lloyd, who was an ardent radical Populist, protested that free silver was becoming the cowbird of the reform movement and was laying its eggs in the nest painstakingly built by the proponents of genuine liberalism. But his voice remained a cry in the wilderness. Another blow to the Populists was the refusal of co-operation by the young and lusty American Federation of Labor on the ground that inflation would bring higher wages. Equally serious was the unresolved Negro question which was plaguing Southern insurgents and forcing them to remain within the Democratic party. Confronted by these difficulties and confused by internal dissent, the Populists committed the fatal error of postponing their national convention until the major parties had held theirs. After Altgeld and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• THE ABOLITIONISTS
• THE UTOPIANS
• THE ANARCHISTS
• THE DISSIDENT ECONOMISTS
• THE MILITANT LIBERALS
• THE SOCIALISTS
• A FINAL NOTE